“What are the public policies that you oppose even though you believe that they would make the world a happier place in the long run?”

Universal health care but to be honest I genuinely equivocate as to whether it would make the US a happier place in the long run.

Banning alcohol and recreational drugs would make the world a much happier place, but only if the bans were effective and came with no unwanted consequences. The problem, of course, is that, in practice, such bans are ineffective, foster organized crime and institutional corruption, and create incentives to develop more concentrated drugs that are easier to smuggle, but that are also more addictive and more lethal.

Such laws also create precedent for other intrusions into civil life.

Unfortunately, outside of Harry Potter’s wizarding world, a cure’s unintended side effects are often worse than the disease.

In the context of the US, most things that reduce labor or hours worked would likely increase happiness, but is something I oppose. Higher marginal tax rates, mandated paid vacation, etc. People would respond by working less, spending less, and investing more time and energy on relationships with friends and family. However, such a change would make the US a place much less focused on achievement and more focused on enjoying life.

i cannot think of a specific example but a concept.  Coase argued that the law on property rights should minimize transaction costs allowing coasean bargaining to be more likely to occur.

Generally he is probably right, but it strikes my deontological senses as wrong in some cases.

Consider the Steve Landsberg/Thanos hypotheticals:

1: Thanos has defeated your group, and now imposes a punishment that everyone in your group must face at least a 50% chance of immediate (though painless) death based on a coin flip. But he gives to you specifically the responsibility to administer the coin-flipping and structure the risks; if you decline this role, EVERYONE dies. Thus, you must choose whether to flip the coin separately for each individual (meaning that the outcome for each individual is uncorrelated with any other individual). Or one coin flip for each household. For each family. Or each city or region or nation….

2: Your sister and her spouse come before you to administer their fate. They tell you that they want you to flip coins for each of them independently, to maximize the chance that at least one of them will survive to carry on the memory of the other. You know that they ADORE each other and, due to infirmities, are heavily dependent upon each other to get through activities of daily living. You suspect that if only one of them dies, the survivor will never be able to cope with the loss—emotionally or practically. You have the option to secretly ignore their preference and flip one coin for the both of them: If the coin comes up heads, they will both live and rejoice in that fact; if tails, they will both die instantly without having to confront this fate (or you). But this action requires you to bear moral responsibility for the outcome. (Ok, SOME responsibility; Thanos bears most of the responsibility.) What do you do?

2a: Same as hypothetical 2, except they ask you to help maximize the chance that one of them survives to carry on their faith/worldview rather than just the memory of a beloved spouse. Same answer?

3: If you see the wisdom of deciding the fate of a couple based on a single coin-flip, would the same rationale apply to flipping one coin to decide the fate of the human race? This strategy would seem perfectly designed to minimize trauma. (Recall Tom Lehrer’s logic: “If the bomb that falls on you gets your friends and neighbors too, there’ll be nobody left behind to grieve!”).

Or do you feel some obligation to disaggregate the risk in order to increase the chance that the human race survives? If so, to WHOM do you owe this obligation? What does this feeling say about individualism vs. collectivism?

4: How would we model the utility-optimization formula? I guess we’d need to quantify the burden of living with enormous trauma; the joy of surviving beyond trauma; the burden of instant, painless death (or would that even enter into the formula?); and the utility to be derived by future generations. I surmise that the utility-optimizing strategy in the short run would be to bet the entire human race on a single coin-flip, giving equal weight to a world in which no one dies instantly and a world in which everyone dies instantly. But if we take the utility of future generations into account, and if those generations utiltimately swamp all other factors, then the risk-disaggregation strategy may be optimal.

Even so, how much disaggregation? One coin flip per family/kinship network/nation might be optimal, because people would tend to feel less grief about the deaths of strangers than the death of kin/fellow countryman. But killing off entire social groups would reduce genetic diversity. And the fewer the coin flips, the greater the odds that you get an unexpected run of tails, thereby eliminating the human race (or eliminating a larger portion than anticipated).

Modelers, start your engines….

Returning humans to a hunter-gatherer existence (waiving away the problems with there being too many people and so on) might improve overall human welfare- impossible to say, but we did evolve for it and many people are happier spending more time outside, getting more exercise, etc. Let’s stipulate for this thought exercise that it would. I would still be against this because it would mean mankind would never unravel the mysteries of the universe. Even if other people don’t care about that as much as I do, etc. I still think that is worth pursuing.

There are other things that could go in this general category- wireheading, genetic changes to make people happy and content, etc.